Prodigy Education is a great resource online for children learning Math and English skills. Most educational games that I have played in the past involve known knowledge from the curriculum or is a timed multiple classroom game. Where your classmates and teacher can see how well you are doing. The past games I have played in school was Kahoot, Jeopardy, and Cool Math Games. Gamifying subjects in schools are starting to become popular and with multiple resources for all subjects the options are endless.
Benefits to Gamifying
Gamifying can be a great resource for education because the younger generations are being introduced to technology at a younger age. This can affect how they interact with classmates, teachers, and support staff. One of the benefits is the introduction of educational gaming. One of the programs that does a great job is Prodigy. Prodigy is focused on English and Math games and can range from kindergarten to grade seven curriculums. This is a great resource for teachers when they have a prep period or an introduction on laptops in the classroom. Prodigy focuses on typing numbers and reading for English.
Another benefit is teaching children subject matter while playing a game. Most children are happy to login to a laptop or tablet in school and it benefits both teachers and students because teachers know platforms involve education curriculum and students are having fun learning. Another benefit for teachers is they can change the grade level for students who have diverse learning needs or are not reading at a certain grade level. This helps determine how the students are improving in the classroom and at home.
The last benefit is that most of these educational games can be played at home. Parents look for educational resources at home to aide their child’s learning and playing a math game on the weekends are better than a game with little to no educational content.
Negatives to be aware of?
One of the major negatives for sites like this is that if a teacher must set up a classroom group the students can see the levels, they are al and can tell a difference between grade levels. Students can also change the level of grades to make it easier but then they are not learning.
One other negative is that some of the educational website’s students can not play games outside of school because home learning is a different subscription. A prime example of this is Epic Books! this program is great reading resource for both parents and teachers because the children could continue their learning at home through there school account. This website has now shut down the at home learning through a school account and of the child wants to use the platform at home parents have to pay for another subscription.
One of the negatives with most educational sites are the pop up adds. They can be distracting for students and if they do not know the effects of adds on the site if they click on them.
One last negative is students are learning different platforms for their learning but do not know how to type or use a laptop or desktop in a computer lap. Once the students know how to use a keyboard and to recognize where the letters are on the keyboard they should not be playing these types of educational games till they know a base level of typing and the difference between using a mouse versus a keypad.
